This invention relates to apparatus for use in testing visual recognition, and especially for use in testing visual recognition in persons suffering from conditions which cause difficulty in their communicating with other people and possibly in their interpretation of their environment. For example, the apparatus may be particularly concerned with testing and thereby exercising the ability of a person suffering from cerebral palsy, or brain damage received in an accident after birth, or monogolism, to recognise shapes presented in a variety of ways, for example, with or without size constancy, in outline or as a dense figure, as a figure or as a background, when rotated or inverted, and so on, or to recognize words corresponding to representations of their referents, or numerals corresponding to countable assemblies of visual stimuli. The apparatus may also be used with pre-school children.
Although various teaching and testing apparatuses which provide visual stimuli for a pupil have been used for over a decade, such known apparatus has either been very limited in terms of adaption to a pupil or to the type of material presented, or very complex and requiring a teacher using the apparatus to have considerable skill in programming. An example of the more complex type of known apparatus is that described in an article entitled "A practical, low-cost, home/school microprocessor system" by Joe Weisbecker at pages 20 to 31 of the August 1974 issue of IEEE Computer and at pages 227 to 238 of "Microprocessors: Fundamentals and Applications", edited by Wen C Lin and published in 1976 by the IEEE Press of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., of New York.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for use in testing visual recognition which apparatus is adapted to the abilities of disabled or immature pupils and can easily be used by an instructor to provide a variety of tests.
Another object of the invention is to provide an apparatus for use in testing visual recognition which apparatus allows an instructor to review errors made during a test after the test is completed.